Be Not Far from Me(40)

Now that I’m far enough away from the tent that I won’t consider lingering I find some running water to check out the slice in my leg, which doesn’t look good but won’t kill me. I clean my foot too, wincing at the coldness of it. I’m still swollen, still hurting, still nowhere near what I’d call healing. The antibiotic cream is a startling white out here among all this dirt. It feels good going on, a hell of a lot better than the sock, even though I ease it on over the wound.

I sling my foot back and test my weight against a new walking stick I found. The only good thing I have to say about it is that it rubs in all new places as I go, leaving the old ones alone. I take inventory, touching each thing as I do. My fireboard and broken whiskey bottle top I couldn’t quite part with dangle from my belt loops, flint and Davey’s knife in my pocket, a reassuring bulge, parts of my dead foot still hanging in a sandwich bag. His tarp is folded neatly and tucked into the back of my jeans, filling the empty space my shrinking body has left behind. My blanket is tied around my throat, what’s left of Davey’s hat clinging around my ears.

I’m moving.

But Lord do I wish there was someone to carry me.





Day Thirteen




The next day dawns warm, humidity plastering my hair to my head and sending rivulets of sweat to trickle down my side before I’ve even limped from my camp to the creek. I stick my whole head in the water, running my fingers through my hair as I do, the closest thing to clean that I can get. My fingers find something and I pop back up for air, creek water running down all sides of me, pooling in my bra. I keep my thumb and forefinger pinched tight as I sit down on the bank to give a good tug, and the tick comes off in my palm.

It’s fat like a grape, skin mottled and stretched as it’s fed on me for I don’t know how long. A while, guessing by the size of it. It’s so full of my blood that its body has covered its legs, so that it’s only a hungry head and a too-full belly. It’s warm against my hand, like a cooked bean, and I pop it in my mouth, crunching down. My own blood fills my mouth, slick and coppery.

I slip down onto my stomach, ribs pressing hard against sharp stones. Davey Beet could pull fish out of a creek like reaching into a cooler for a beer, nothing to it. He’d tried to teach me, but I’d never been able, only coming close once when I managed to knock a smallmouth onto the bank and it had flipped and flopped between us, making me screech and him laugh until the poor thing found the water again and left us behind with a splash.

I couldn’t do it then, but I wasn’t dying then, either. And today there’s no chance of me being distracted by Davey’s freckled arm close to mine, or how his hands glided smooth and slow under the water. I know the fate of those hands, and how that arm looks now. The only place my mind wanders as I wait for an unwary fish to pass by is if I’m going to end up looking the same, and how soon.

Nevertheless, I’m too anxious with the first two fish that pass under my hand, wiggling my fingers along with the current. I twitch the wrong way at the wrong moment and they split, sensing that something’s off. It’s not until I’m warm from the sun, sweat running down in between my shoulder blades and half-asleep myself that I feel one brush up against my palm.

I move fast, clenching my fist tight and jerking my arm out of the water. I’m not smooth like Davey, pulling it up and out with confidence. It’s more like I just toss a whole bunch of water along with a fish up onto the shore, but the result is the same—a white-bellied trout tossing on the rocks, gills opening and closing as it drowns in air.

I’ve got a knife and a piece of tin and I can sure as hell make a fire, but all those thoughts are human and logical, and they pass like a quick rainstorm. A larger part of my mind is desperate and half-wild, fishing like a bear, and eating like one too.

The fish is small and goes down easy; its tail flapping against the roof of my mouth for a brief second before it’s gone. I sit on the bank, feel it make a cold journey, still twitching, down into my stomach. It rests there for a moment as if confused, then stages a last revolt, panicked and flailing in my gut.

It’s too much for my shriveled stomach and I vomit, bending forward onto hands and knees as the fish makes its way back up my throat, accompanied by a handful of fern fronds. It breaks out from between my teeth and lands in the stream, bile-coated and shocked, but alive. I blink and it’s gone, and I’d swear the whole thing never happened in the first place if it weren’t for the scales coating my lips.

I lick them off, take a drink of cold water, and keep moving.

At camp they told us the story of Jonah and the whale, how God asked Jonah to do something (I forget what) and Jonah didn’t like it, so he got on a boat and went the opposite direction of where he was supposed to. There was a storm, the boat sank, and Jonah would have died except for a whale swallowed him, and he lived in that thing’s belly for three days, praying for deliverance, and the whale burped him back out. Then Jonah went and did the thing he was supposed to do in the first place, feeling properly chastised.

I don’t know if that fellow I ate was saying a fish version of a prayer as it flipped and flopped in my belly, but the result was the same. It came back up and maybe right now it’s going to go do something it’s supposed to do with its life, delivered from certain death. I’m contemplating whether fish have a purpose other than making more fish when I get spots in my vision and have to sit down.